it seems like maybe it doesn't raise up to the level of e.o.c. but this is a key message we've been trying to push, it doesn't have to be a big event in order to have the benefits of the cross departmental, cross-agency coordination. in this case, this is specifically one of those events that really benefits from getting people in the room because oftentimes what happens is if something -- if there's an event, it gets put in the dispatch system, we get pages and updates and what the fire and police part is done, they go back to their stations and go back in service and it drops off everybody's radar so one of my charges to my team has been to keep tracking these events beyond the end of the first respond because it is first respond. it doesn't mean the event is done. we've really seen that in dealing with displaced people and a lot of these fires in the past year and it also folds over into this where we're able to maintain tracking it for several days after it until we get a sense that we've got to the recovery phase and it's down to one or two

i didn't know what the e.o.c. was so that's when i knew we were on our own and since then watsonville has elected over five latino mayors and council members. the response recovery and recovery relationship needs start now not after disasters as i learned when i tried get re'em bursement. i was denied three times. paul worked on that until the state did. because i did not have a -- with the city to provide those services. so i made it a point that all of our community-based organizations have contracts with us vand m.o.u.'s with us to provide. and they are all disaster workers. managing disaster response donations and items and goods should be planned before to take advantage of the goodwill of individuals and communities and businesses to help with the response and recovery process, our company learned well that we were going to do dwop our own program. we were able to use this for grants for home repairs. if any of you have seen the pictures, all the houses looked like they leaned in to each other. we lost thousands of foundations. we repaired 1,000 water heerts and -- heaters and o

i say bunker mentality is the number one enemy of the e.o.c.'s so the way you can avoid that and open it up -- so the third thing we did is we established a network of communication using the business community and the leadership structure, the chamber of commerce, the downtown association to purble the information back out and also to get feedback in. so we understood what were the big things that people needed. then, we had to build an ad hoc organization and another thing about disasters is they're bigger by definition something you can manage. it's not manageable. that's why it's a disaster, right? if it was manageable, it wouldn't be a disaster, it would be an incident, right? so we had about 15 or 20 people that i brought out of city hall, just picked people i kind of thought would be good at thinking on their feet and didn't need to read a book to now what the rules were. so we brought them and then we used hundreds of volunteers to support that. and the big project was trying to find a way to get policies and process in place to allow th

win and you have what i've been calling celebratory chaos so the point was getting everybody in the e.o.c. ahead of time working together to solve problems before they're big problems and we learn from every one of these things so we went home disappointed that night but we were there in case it went the way it did. prior to that, it also means -- this is one thing i have to say, a note of progress. because prior to the game, we had a request from park and rec. and d.p.w. to pull together a team and do coordination about -- because, honestly, i didn't really think about it, i forgot because i hadn't been down there in too many years, the marina effect at candlestick when the parking lot floods so we got a team together and was able to keep track of what was happening. everybody knew what the other participants were up to. it was quite helpful. then going into the game, we all knew who was doing what and what the efforts were throughout the game. it was quite helpful. it went really well, all things considered. there's always stuff to learn from. we'll do a hot wash on it next week, is whe